ACOB ANNUAL CHICKEN POT PIE FUNDRAISER

Kathy schrader, Left & Kate WEntling, Right making pot pie

A successful fundraising effort requires multiple things: first, a product or service people are willing to pay to obtain followed by volunteers willing to organize, set up, and carry out the efforts involved in the fundraising event.

In the case of Annville Church of the Brethren, the product is chicken pot pie and the organizers of the fundraiser for the past 10 years are church members Kathy Schrader and Kate Wentling.

The most recent annual fundraising sale of quarts of Pennsylvania Dutch chicken pot pie (most accurately described as a thick noodle soup) raised approximately $4,000 in March 2023. The recipient of this year’s fundraiser has not yet been selected but in past years, has included denomination and/or church outreach projects, expenses for church youth to attend church camp and National Youth Conference, church kitchen renovations or a community need.

Originally conceived as a dinner at the church where tickets were sold, over the years the annual fundraising dinner transitioned into its current form where quarts of pot pie are presold. In a typical year, between 625 and 650 quarts of chicken pot pie are sold. Due to the rising cost of ingredients, the cost increased slightly this year to $8.50 per quart.

Held annually in March, the chicken pot pie sale requires Kathy and Kate to begin working behind the scenes soon after the start of each new year.

“We begin watching for good deals on ingredients in January,” Kathy explains.

Of course, the main ingredient of chicken pot pie is chicken – for 625-650 quarts of finished pot pie, that means about 60 chickens. Church members volunteer to cook down the chickens, sometimes at their homes and other times in small groups in the church kitchen.

Once the chickens are cooked and the meat removed from the bones, other ingredients are weighed and measured in preparation for a small army of volunteers who gather in the church kitchen to complete the pot pie. Those volunteers spend two days on such tasks as peeling potatoes, working the dough and rolling it out, stirring the pot pie as it cooks, and filling the containers.

Volunteers are solicited through announcements at church and individual contacts. People can sign up for the day or days they want to volunteer and also for the specific job they wish to do. Volunteers are rewarded with doughnuts and breakfast casseroles on the days they work. Each of the two-day shifts is between two and five hours.

The specific recipe used for the chicken pot pie is a secret. The recipe originated decades ago from church members Charlotte and Gladys Wampler. It has been tweaked only a bit over the years, most often when ingredients have increased significantly in price or are no longer available. The original recipe called for specific brands of ingredients, which became problematic as the years passed. Also, the recipe has been changed to reflect precise measurements (Kate reports the original version called for the “white mug full of onions” and a specific number of eggs, which Kathy and Kate have found is more accurately measured by cups, not number since the size of eggs can vary widely). Even with the recipe and years of experience, Kathy and Kate say some years they have to adjust on the fly, such as sometimes adding additional broth to make the finished pot pie “just right.”

The annual pot pie sale is held in March, but the exact date varies from year to year as Kathy and Kate work around Easter and their own schedules to set the date, but the final product is always put together and finished on a Friday and Saturday.

Although dozens of volunteers put in hundreds of hours to get the final product out the church door, Kathy and Kate contribute the lion’s share of work, but it’s an effort they clearly enjoy, although both say they wish there was an easier, faster way to get the chickens cooked and prepared. Pot pie not a difficult dish to prepare, Kathy notes, but it does take quite a bit of time since it involves multiple steps and quite a few ingredients.

Kathy explains, “I enjoy the fellowship and I like it when people compliment the final product. There are some years where I feel like I can’t do it again, but then people tell me how much they look forward to it and how they wait all year for it, and I decide to do it again.”

It’s continuing a decades-long tradition that propels Kate to do the work each year. “Annville is known locally for its pot pie, and I enjoy being a part of that,” she says.

Once all of the containers filled with pot pie are out the door, the work continues. Kathy and Kate write notes to include in the decades-old chicken pot pie folder, which includes details from each year’s fundraiser (including the amount of money made, cost of ingredients, where the funds were distributed, and any suggestions they have for the following year).

You might think Kathy and Kate would be tired of chicken pot pie by the time this fundraiser is done, but that’s not the case. Kate doesn’t make pot pie at home for her family as she says she doesn’t often cook large meals from scratch, but Kathy makes small batches for her family throughout the year. She tweaks the recipe slightly but says her smaller family version tastes nearly identical to the church version once she’s finished.

The annual spring chicken pot pie sale is only one of a number of kitchen projects Kathy and Kate coordinate at Annville COB. Another major effort is making chicken pot pie for the annual Disaster Relief Auction in Lebanon. For that, volunteers prepare the pot pie and deliver it to the auction where it is sold by as part of a meal or in larger quantities to be carried out. That usually involves around 100 quarts, the proceeds of which go to the auction for disaster relief. The total raised through that project varies as it depends on whether the majority is sold as part of a meal at the auction or whether most of it is sold in larger quantities.

Written by Kathy Hackleman